ORGANIZATIONAL ROLES OF MARKETING AND MARKETING MANAGERS



Organizational Roles Of Marketing And Marketing Managers

Abstract

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to design a comprehensive responsibilities inventory for today's marketing managers, from which it develops factual inferences for the role of marketing in corporations.Methodology: A content analysis on online job announcements is used to define the role inventory of the marketing manager.Findings: The findings reveal that marketing managers are responsible for six role dimensions in the organization. The marketing manager's assigned roles are for the management of promotion-related activities of the company, rather than for managing other marketing mix elements. Communicational and relational (internal and external) role clusters are the most frequently addressed of marketing managers' responsibilities. Knowledge development and injection of market and marketing knowledge into the company's value network is another of the major role dimensions. Increasing financial pressures on companies mean that the outcomes of marketing actions must be measurable, so developing and reporting performance analysis and financial metrics for marketing activities has become an important part of the manager's agenda.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract2

CHAPTER I5

Introduction5

CHAPTER II13

Background13

The role of marketing in corporations21

Roles and responsibilities of marketing managers25

Internal/external network management27

Knowledge generation and management29

Customer relationships management30

Marketing productivity and performance management32

Beginnings34

On the discourse of marketing management37

Beyond the culture of the gap42

The language of marketing management46

The rhetorics of marketing management52

Kotler the commodity57

On the one-dimensional marketing academic60

CHAPTER III67

Methodology67

Findings71

CHAPTER IV74

Discussion74

Conclusion77

References88

Appendix105

CHAPTER I

Introduction

Marketing management has undergone significant changes over the past three decades (Webster, 2005). Accelerating changes in external environments and internal developments in organizations raise many important questions related to the survival and the future forms of the marketing organization and to the implementation of the marketing process (Thomas and Gupta, 2005; Piercy and Cravens, 1995). Many well-understood forces, such as globalization, technology, fierce competition, and increasing complexity in customer demand, have led to changes in marketing concepts and their related activities in practice. Marketing activities have become more diverse and are often carried out by several companies and/or in several functional areas, all of which use information as a key raw material of marketing (Wyner, 2008).

Over the past two decades, marketing scholars' and practitioners' discussions, conceptual arguments and intellectual inferences on the role of marketing and marketing managers have suggested several emergent roles (Achrol and Kotler, 1999; Webster, 1992; Morgan, 1996; Day and Montgomery, 1999; Doyle, 1995). The conceptual debate on issues in marketing, where marketing activities were organized as part of the marketing department has been well established in the literature, but more studies are required embracing proofs, signals, and insights from the practice (Piercy, 1986; Tull et al., 1991; Moorman and Rust, 1999; Harris and Ogbonna, 2003). Such research has the potential to provide a significant framework in terms of which marketing tasks are assigned to the marketing function and which are not. The outcomes may serve as a base for discussions on the eroding status and efficiency of the function in organizations and may influence the way of thinking in marketing theory, practice, and education.

The objective of this research is twofold: to design ...